Comments by royalperidot

Katie, this article moved me beyond tears and took me to a place of deeper understanding. Your experiences reminded me of some of the terrible people I deal with in the mental health sector, callous “professionals” who lord their supposed superiority over others, flouting privacy laws because they can. In all my years as a “consumer”, I have never met a radical nurse or para-professional. However, I did have a very genuine psychiatrist discretely give me the link to Ron Unger’s work, which lead me to Monica Cassani (sp?), whose work inspired my continuing journey out of mental health hell. Your bravery, and that of other people speaking out against this system, will continue to provide much needed light for those still caught up in the system.

While reading the comments, I did noticed that a few commenters made comparisons to US slavery. This concerns me because the analogy does not work. Slavery was not just psychologically sad, or a simply a state of unease, it devoured the physical bodies of African American people. Slavery meant being shipped away from everything you knew, packed into boats as cattle and forced to endure extreme physical and sexual assaults, regardless of gender or age. One social scientist commented that at one point, you could see the bones of Africans who were thrown overboard or committed suicide in the Atlantic Ocean via sonar. Incredibly dehumanizing.

While I agree that modern US psychiatry causes real harm to many people, I will never compare it to American chattel slavery or even modern-day slavery. I have been through pain as a current consumer in the mental health system (forced injections, hospitalizations, and physical punishment), but it does not compare to the shear unrelenting hell that African American slaves experienced and modern day human trafficking victims currently endure.

Oddly enough, from some of your post that mentioned race, I thought you were hostile to race specific issue being mentioned.

Tokenism means bringing in people who differ from an established group norm simply as window dressing; their perspectives and insights don’t matter as much as maintaining the status quo while seeming “diverse”. Tokens have no real voice.

MIA has a unique enough platform to include perspectives from a multitude of voices without seeming forced or fake. Not every article has been a tour de force thinkpiece by an academic who gets it. And that works because stories and comments from survivors embody the soul of MIA.

Even though I don’t agree with you and you don’t agree with me on some key issues, I do believe that we both want to see this horrible system of oppression dismantled. Perhaps from that vantage point, we can find common ground.

Thank you MIA team for all of the awesome work that you have done. I value the attempt to address some of the problems within the community in terms of the lack of diversity (racial and economic), as well as language used to describe what’s going on with us. In 2017, I hope that this conversation continues in a manner that can be constructive for the community, so we can propel ourselves into a real broad-based movement. In addition, I would like to read more stories from people of all types of racial and economic backgrounds. It gives greater context to the depth of harm occurring across socioeconomic lines.

Rebel, I am moved by your posts that teem with love, compassion and bravery. And shout out to oldhead, Frank Blankenship, human being and others educating the silent majority who may not comment, but observe the debates nonetheless. People need to know that alternatives options and voices do exist.

Iden, Sera, Earl and AVoiceRaised, thank you. All of you have given voice to the unease I have felt about the racism and elitism within the anti-psychiatry movement for a very long time. For the sake of so many people still stuck in the rotten system (myself included), I hope these issues continue to be addressed so that we can produce tangible gains rather than be relegated to the dustbins of history.

I refuse to use the term identity politics. It’s not a term that I identify with any movement that I support.

Singing kumbaya, are struggles are all the same, let’s smash authority without acknowledging that certain communities have faced disproportionate harm due to what they look like and who they love, and that these communities have the right to affirm and embrace their uniqueness doesn’t make sense. You cannot destroy any of these issues by using the homogenizing, one-size fits all, social justice model. Look at how well that worked for the mainstream feminist movement.

Vulture capitalism keeps people at each others throats. And the elites will use any tool possible to keep people from recognizing it as the true enemy. Embracing difference isn’t one of them.

Genuine movements don’t grow by ignoring the very real pain and problems that people go through simply because of the way they look or who they love, in addition to the common struggles that particular movement addresses. Many of the issues addressed here are grossly exacerbated in communities of color in the US.

Apathy and greed, rather than lack of knowledge of the problems we face, led us to this predicament. I hope those actively involved in the battle against Big Pharma and social control, can wake as many people up as possible before we cross the bridge of no return.

This is one of the battles of our time, and we need to embrace our differences, rather than stifle them, to succeed.

I did not interpret your statement as a comparison between slavery and psychiatry. Rather, my interpretation centered around the nature of the debates rather than the subject matter itself. That one side is right and the other side is wrong. We’re on the same page, worded differently for a variety of reasons.

(fill in the modern atrocity) versus/parallels/comparisons to ante-bellum slavery/slave trade or the Holocaust should end. People have been doing terrible things to each other since the dawn of time. The real fight lies in encouraging true system change through a variety of channels (political, cultural, academic), not shaming people into behaving better than their ancestors.

Dr. Burstow, I am sorry you feel this way. Psychiatric Physicians are definitely not comparable to slave owners. Nonetheless, thank you for taking the time to speak with me and I wish you well.
-Kal

I did not interpret Dr. Burstow’s comment as comparing slave owners to psychiatrists. Instead, I interpret her statement as centering around the debates that took place regarding slavery and how it compares to the debates taking place around psychiatry. The parallels between both issues stem less from pros and cons to what I see as good versus morally bankrupt.